I need to rant. I need to rant about America; no, I need to rant about the World, and the people in it. I need to talk and I need people to listen.

The Art Form of Redirecting Hatred is becoming a serious problem for people. Discrimination against women, blacks and gay people wasn’t just a problem. It was cruel. It was cruel and unjust, and in this modern day world we live in, people forget that. They scream about the modern day issues without realizing they are just contributing to a bigger problem.

You dislike (hate) a girl in school. The modern day idea would be to be passive aggressive, talk in this sarcastic, annoying ‘hello’ voice. It would be to insult her in a non obvious way and continue to annoy her because she annoys you.

Do you see the problem? This doesn’t deal with the hatred; it redirects it. It doesn’t stop it; it creates more hatred, meanness, and cruelty. Sure, this girl may be cruel and annoying and generally mean, but you aren’t solving the problem. You are giving her further excuse to make the problem worse, and in so doing, you are making the problem worse.

Let’s say this person hates on gays; they are continually cruel to them, and it doesn’t help these people any (they are people, whatever their sexual attraction may be, and I’ll say it as loud as anyone) and another person dislikes them for doing it. They start slamming this hating person’s character; they call this person a homophobe and a freak. Rather than helping the person or persons being hurt, they give this person license to continue and worsen the problem.

I may and do disagree with homosexuality, but I don’t condone hatred, and I don’t condone hating on haters, because two wrongs don’t make any right whatsoever, and if you didn’t hear that from your mom you just heard it from me. You can tell the hater, or the hated even, that you disagree with them, but being cruel to them just worsens existing problems. Being kind to them, and just with them, is more likely to force a solution than injustice and meanness.

Because women were and sometimes still are oppressed, feminists, rather than speaking quietly, politely and being kind, scream that they hate men and men are awful and men are barbaric and ought to be imprisoned and so on and so forth, and rather than solving sexism they transfer the problem from women being hated to men being hated, which is just as unjust and ridiculous and awful. It’s like how any woman can just say a man sexually abused her and she’ll instantly be guaranteed getting away from that man, whereas a man who has been abused by a woman is forced to suffer in silence or be called a misogynist and a freak. This is terrible and a new and dangerous type of sexism that I am terrified my brother will suffer from when he enters college; being blamed for looking at someone or touching their shoulder or doing some other perfectly innocent thing, while if they sincerely hurt him they’ll get away with it.

Hating on men just transfers a problem. Hating on straight people just transfers a problem. Hating on hatred just piles up hatred. Hatred does nothing but make already bad situations worse, and make fair situations unfair.

What is the solution? Kindness.

Instead of calling people freaks, make them friends and silence them with your kindness. Silence them with your generosity, friendship and peace. If you are angry with someone, go out of your way to smile at them, and be kind and genuine with them, and if you try properly, your anger will cool if not disappear. If you dislike someone, give them a cookie, make them a birthday card, and find out why they act as they do; nobody does things without a reason. People often act hateful not because they are hateful but because, like everyone, they have issues. The person who yells, snaps, or screams at you is often not angry at you, but at the situation they are currently in. They yell because things have piled up. It is not you. Just do everyone in the situation a favor and assume it is not you.

Your inexplicable kindness and love, if it does not silence them, will show them up as ridiculous. If you’re the person who compliments everyone on their clothes, who laughs at the mean jokes directed at you, defends the helpless, and helps out the sick people, the mean, petty people will have no reason to hate you. They will be reduced to the inevitable ‘because.’

Let’s not hate on Christians because some Christians have hated on blacks. Let’s not hate on Catholics because some Catholics have been unreasonable bigots. Let’s not hate on Muslims because some Muslims have killed people. Let’s solve the problems, sure, but not by hatred because hatred solves nothing. Let’s not hate on men. Let’s agree to care for everyone, and leave them without excuse.

Let’s kill them with our kindness and good intentions. Let’s leave the people who aren’t really cruel and are just having a bad day with a better day. Have you ever been short with someone because you were having a terrible day, you were tired or exhausted or your friend had done something unreasonable?

Probably, even if you don’t realize it. So be nice to the people who may well just be doing the same because of personal issues. Understand that people may be doing things for the worst intentions, but until it is proved that they are, believe that they aren’t.

Sure, there are bigots in the world, but don’t assume everyone you talk to is a bigot just because they don’t agree with you. Be nice instead. Don’t swear at people and try not to swear at situations so that any kids who overhear you won’t think that’s okay and start calling women whores, men bastards and so on. (I apologize if I offended anyone with the use of those words, but I needed to make an example.)

If you are upset and short, do everyone a favor and tell them that you are upset because of personal issues and not because of them. Be nice to the waiters and food service workers and shop clerks and so on, because your niceness costs you nothing, and let me tell you, as the younger sister of a woman who worked with rather petty people, it will make these people’s day infinitely better, and being petty will just leave them in a slalom pit of misery. At least explain that you’ve been having a miserable day and it’s not them.

Be nice to literally everybody, and you’ll feel cleaner and better. You’ll know that you’ve been nice if everybody’s been cruel, and at the end of the day, lacking that guilt with which to blame yourself will make you feel infinitely lighter. (Take it from me.)

So just because someone’s been unkind, don’t be unkind to them. Just because someone’s been judgemental, don’t be judgemental of them, because it just creates bigger problems.

Be nice. Sincerely, niceness costs nothing. It doesn’t even cost the ten cents a day that commercials plead for, and it makes other people’s lives better, easier, and more pleasant.

Compliment absolute strangers. It feels good to be complimented, and you may make a bad day a good day just by doing that. Talk to a kid on the subway to give that poor mother a break; kids love to talk, and they’ll stop throwing a tantrum to talk to an adult or teenager. Rather than resenting the couple with a screaming baby, help them out. Don’t embarrass them, make them feel better.

Start small and inspire big. The smallest acts of kindness transfer and become the greatest acts of love.

Being nice to people will not only give you self esteem, make you well liked and remembered when you leave the earth, and leave a legacy, but it will start a change. If twenty people walked up to you and gave you a compliment, I think you’d walk up to twenty people and give them compliments. Just start by complimenting or smiling at or being reasonlessly nice to ten people today, and I’m willing to bet you they’ll be reasonlessly nice to at least one or two people tomorrow, or they’ll tell a story about you and inspire someone else, or you’ll turn a terrible day around.

You can change the world. You can. You just have to get it going. Please share this message. Please share this legacy. Be nice. Introduce yourself. Be that person who changes the world. Don’t hate. Love. Don’t transfer hatred; solve hatred. Solve problems.

Give them no excuse.

God bless you all, you’re all beautiful and wonderful and amazing and I love you all, and have the best day ever. XD ❤ ❤ XOXOXO

My sister showed me the iambic verse ‘lyk the bred’ meme on Tumblr, and because I don’t have a Tumblr, and because I can’t resist a new poetry form and a retelling of a Thor Ragnarok preview, I wrote something and am posting it here. I apologize for all ensuing ridiculousness.

My name is Thor

and when it’s day

my enemies

I go to slay;

and when it’s Hulk

for hug I go

he puncheth me;

and I say whoa.

If you see this again, it’s probably because my Dad steals my poem to put it on his twitter.

He’ll credit me, and if he doesn’t, I will sue him. XD (Not really, just hug him strenuously until he repents his vile actions and confesses.)

Like it, hate it, just sitting there and going ‘how can I have an opinion on something so stupid’? Feel free to tell me in the comments, and God Bless!!

Philosophy has high-jacked my life; why shouldn’t I write a story about it?

Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXIX

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

I met her on a spaceship, on the way to the stars. We were children, and our parents had sent us away from a dying earth, supposedly to save us, but it really seemed sometimes that it was more because they didn’t want us. The sun would be exploding in a while (read a couple millennia yet), and it would be goodbye earth, goodbye remnants of older human civilizations, hello brave new world built by children sent away from that earth.

If it sounds depressing, it’s because it always was, to me, until I met her. I was fifteen or so when we met and I think she was fourteen; it’s hard to remember the details of age. But I still remember what her face looked like when she was talking and the way her eyes used to light up and the way her mouth used to quirk upward, like life was not only infinitely amusing but infinitely joyful.

You might say that I saw the light when I met her, but I didn’t. I saw the dark when I met her, for the first time in my life, and because I really saw the dark, I finally realized what light was.

Because of various scientific advances and all that crap, we were only going to be on the spaceship for a year or so before we landed on Xeria, the new planet we were traveling to. We had to do school and so on, and wash our hair still and still exercise and act like normal humans, even though we were in a low-gravity environment, with no grass and no trees and no dirt and no opportunity to really have any fun whatsoever. There were no clubs; there was no alcohol, none of the ‘normal’ stuff teenagers do that really shouldn’t be normal in the first place. There weren’t even parks, no swing sets because duh, no gravity, no basketball either unless you wanted to get hit in the face and break your teeth, and nothing else.

There were girls of course, but I was only fifteen and had never really moved out of the shy stage where boys like girls and just don’t talk to them. That changed when I met her, but she was an abnormal girl, an abnormal human being, and you’ll be thinking that’s a bad thing.

Humans always do. They’re obsessed with conforming to whatever seems to be the current thing to do.

She wasn’t like that.

I met her about two months in to the trip, because it had taken her longer to figure out low gravity than it had the rest of us, but I don’t believe that was part of her abnormality. I believe that it was so mathematical, so thorough, that she had to be slow about it, the end result being to comprehend it better than the rest of us did. It’s like proving the Pythagorean theorem all by yourself rather than just accepting what other people have done before you; it sure takes longer, but in the long run, you probably understand it better and are smarter than the people who just say; ‘oh, so x+y is substituted for c and that makes it c2 and it equals a2+b2? Cool, man. What’s for lunch?’

She was like that. She didn’t just accept the universe; she analyzed it, and made it her universe rather than just the universe. She didn’t just accept the rules; she isolated the rules, one by one, and made sense out of them with her own little head.

I met her among the very small group of people staring out at space. We had gotten tired of the dead darkness of being past light speed a long time ago. But I had already finished my school and junk, and didn’t really want to talk or read, and wasn’t really in the mood to do anything, so I went down to the windows. The others who were there pretty much deserted their post when the captain called that the rec room was going to be used for an impromptu game of space soccer (don’t ask), but there was one girl who stayed.

She was like—delicate, with sort of see through skin even though, like the rest of us, she was pretty fairly ethnically mixed. Her lips were pale and nearly bluish. Her cheeks were almost devoid of color. Her hands were long and very thin, and the standard issue clothing looked like she was wearing oversized karate clothes. But her eyes were enormous and intelligent and bluish-gray, and framed with long dark lashes, and very beautiful. They were the sort of beautiful that you admire like a painting; for hours on end, always noticing something new.

Her nose was a little point, with no substance to it, and she looked like a fragile glass vase; if you dropped her, she would shatter into a thousand tiny fragments. But there was a subtle strength to her, a sturdiness, which I didn’t pin down until at least our third conversation.

Rather than just remaining in silence, she turned to study me. I ignored her. She stuck out her hand, like you see in ancient twentieth century movies. “My name is Seraf—S-e-r-a-f. Seraf O’Malley. It’s nice to meet you.”

I took her hand, awkwardly, unused to touching strangers. I didn’t exactly shake her hand, but she shook mine and saved me the trouble. “Uh, ditto, I guess. My name’s Theodore.”

Her smile was very bright and very—whole hearted. Generous. Like she was giving the entire world a present she wanted it to open. “Excellent. Why are you here, Theodore?”

I blinked at her. People didn’t just ask questions like that. “I guess I didn’t really want to do anything at all.”

She frowned a bit. “Wasn’t what I was asking. I felt pulled here, this morning. I felt a moment of inspiration. ‘The quieter you become, the more you can hear.’ Ram Dass. Not a very good quote for the occasion, but it seemed propitious while I was saying it. Ah, Einstein. ‘The intellect has little to do with discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.’ Somewhat better.”

I’ll admit to you that by this time I was fascinated, how you get when you are looking at a lizard or a bird you have never seen before. I’d never met a girl who talked like this. I didn’t say anything, I just stared at her.

She smiled. “You want to ask me a question, don’t you?”

I found I did, but wasn’t sure if it were a rude question. “You think we’re meant to meet?”

“Subtext; do you really buy into that all that religion and divine beings nonsense? Yes, yes and yes. But that’s simply because I, as an intellectual, cannot abide with all the various assumptions that go into the various theories of evolution. Theories, yes. The theory various intellectuals hold today is hardly the theory that Darwin started with, that of evolution through the engine of natural selection. The theory based thereof, that of microevolution through natural selection, is today fairly well accepted, but the idea of macroevolution through such engine has been disavowed by nearly all. You are free to believe whatever it is you wish to believe; therein lies your free will.”

I blinked at her. She studied me closely, and with it, her smile grew. “Excellent,” she said. “Theodore, it would seem that you can cope with me. You haven’t run off screaming yet.”

I said something intelligent. “Um… Thank you?”

Seraf gave a grave little laugh. “You are very welcome, but your gratitude is unnecessary. I didn’t make you the way you are. You did.”

I shook my head. “If you believe in God, wouldn’t you think God made me the way I am? Unless you’re a Deist, of course and—I’ve probably offended you, I’m sorry.”

“There was no ill intent in your words; how could I be so foolish as to be offended by them? I am not a Deist. I am a Roman Catholic, and shall be still when Rome is oblivion. The Pope shall adapt. We shall find a new Rome. I am confident of that. We have a belief in free will. That God set out the basic us, and then let us define ourselves within it. Let me see; ah, Madeleine L’Engle. A Wrinkle in Time. She compares our human lives to a sonnet. A particular rhyme scheme and rhythm, but complete freedom within the basic parameters.

“So yes, you are yourself, though you are like other people in certain respects. We do not say that all Shakespeare’s sonnets were the same; we do not have school children read only one. Your life is specific, individual. Even two sonnets with the same topic and purpose are not the same sonnet. They express different emotions, compare different possibilities. You are Theodore. You are. You exist, and the whole universe will remember, when you are gone, how infinite you were despite your finite parameters.” Seraf explained.

Uh, it’s sort of science fiction, friendship and philosophy, and it’s supposed to end up as a short story. Whether it will or not? I have no idea.

I already told you guys about my recent self-doubt and difficulty coping, and I’m probably expressing it in my work more than I really should. This is sort of what happened when I got overwhelmed last night. It’s sort of about the apocalypse, the real one, when the world ends?

I dreamed a dream

I dreamed a dream of stars which fell from haven and of mist which rose from the water.

I dreamed of red rivers and a city of alabaster, clad in a gown of endless night.

I dreamed an explosion of blood in the east and a storm of cold ravaging the earth,

As the earth quaked, and sundered.

I dreamed of terrible wars which came, a ground which yielded no produce.

I dreamed women screaming as the moon fell from a darkened sky.

I dreamed unimaginable pain, and fell among the ashes.

And I yet wonder if it truly happened, or if I dreamed it in a dream.

So, yeah. It’s… cheery.

I don’t know. I love you all, thanks so much for reading my work, and God bless.